Does A Bad Movie Help A Good Actor or Hurt Them by Gary Hainsworth

August 2022, updated January 2023

Does a bad movie help a good actor, already established in their field, or hurt them? I guess it all depends. If an actor always appears in good movies, surrounded by thespians of likewise superior quality, if not better, they might not stand as much. Dissolve, as it were, diluted by the general greatness of others just as good or better performances. However, if they appear in a bad movie and are easily the best things in it, one can better tell good quality from bad since there is so much bad to contrast that good against. Case in point: Raul Julia in the movie Street Fighter (1994), which was one of two posthumous releases for the actor. The other posthumous release is the Showtime TV movie Down Came a Blackbird (1995), whose average 6.5 rating on IMDB indicates that the movie is neither great nor bad. Serviceable, mediocre, competent enough, or its kindest equivalent appears to be an adequate description and summary of the film's quality. Whereas Street Fighter's average rating on IMDB of 4.0 suggests that something went wrong from initial concept to finished product. Very, very wrong. Personally, the film, for all its faults and failures, arguably because of them, has remained a guilty pleasure of mine since its release two days before Christmas in the year of our lord 1994. Why? Don't know, though I can speculate.

Is Street Fighter (1994) a bad movie? Yes. Is it 'so bad, it's good?' Absolutely, and therein lies in no short part part of that ironic appeal. An appeal no doubt due in long part due to Raul Julia's sincere and bombastic performance. The Pax Bisonica speech, 'It was Tuesday' scene, and other fine contributions by Raul Julia make what could have otherwise been an unmemorable performance in an otherwise forgettable film more than the sum of its parts, meager as they are. Raul Julia more than proved his quality with performances in The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), and the role of Gomez Adams in the two Barry Sonnenfeld-directed Addams Family movies (in 1991 and 1993), which unfortunately did not get to become a trilogy directed by Barry Sonnenfeld starring the incomparable Raul Julia. However, his talent truly stands out in this movie because little else does in this Jean Claude Damme vehicle made during an era when the words 'based on a video game' virtually guaranteed that the movie would be bad. Whereas if the movie had instead been based on a book, a television series, or in exceptionally rare cases that proved fruitful, a theme-park ride, instead, there might be a chance that the resultant movie is not destined to be garbage and give one that icky feeling one gets given up good money to watch a bad movie. And by bad, I mean awful. The type of awful that leaves one filling empty. Like if you ate a meal that somehow made you both hungrier and thirstier after you ate it. The cinematic equivalent to over-indulging in pica in lieu of actual sustenance or drinking water straight from the Dead Sea, Great Salt Lake, or the Salton Sea. All aptly named for their extraordinary salinity. 

By watching Street Fighter (1994), one can see in stark relief how good Raul Julia was as an actor by being able to immediately contrast it with its ostensible opposite: bad acting, poor writing. Only talent could make half the clunky exposition sound like something a plausible human being could say because a great actor somehow made it work. I suppose one has an easier time finding a diamond in the rough if it is around such roughage. Largely because of Raul Julia, arguably only because of Raul Julia, is Street Fighter (1994) does the debate on whether or not Street Fighter is a cult classic with immense rewatch value have any plausibility. Perhaps the movie is a complete failure, but it remains an interesting one that showcased the tremendous range of a phenomenal actor that elevated material beneath his talent. So, does a bad movie help a good actor or hurt them? It all depends, though I'm leaning toward it being more likely to be an asset than a liability if their performance is indeed good. It can provide an actor a vehicle to showcase their talent with little competition to potentially overshadow them. Be the proverbial big fish in a small pond even if that pond is a glorified puddle. However, it can work the other way too. Effectively harming their careers because they've become 'one of those actors.' Donald Pleasance kept appearing in the Michael Myers Halloween movies long after the franchise stopped being good, with his last outing, the posthumously released The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), easily the worst of the series (somewhat improved by its Producers Cut, which is not a good movie but it is at least not an awful one like its theatrically released counterpart). 

Joan Crawford's final role was in Trog (1970), a laughably bad science fiction movie that features a fine performance from her, if little else worthwhile or laudable about the film except its camp value. Bela Lugosi's performance in Bride of the Monster (1955) does demonstrate that Lugosi had more dramatic range than his overall filmography suggested and his typecast as a Universal monster allowed him to break free of. A filmography no doubt littered with examples of Hollywood studios typecasting him into certain roles, especially Dracula. Boris Karloff's appearances in some Roger Corman films, in particular the Poe films, suggest that Karloff, an actor most famous for playing Frankenstein's monster, could play characters more articulate, complex, and polysyllabic. A movie like The Terror (1963), which appears to exist for no other reason than the opportunity to make it presented itself using leftover film sets, Karloff's unutilized time, and Jack Nicholson, an unknown actor at the time who wouldn't have his breakthrough role until Easy Rider (1969), meant that a brand new movie could be made in two days even if there was no finished script or idea what it could end up being, and it showed that Karloff was a pretty good actor even if the movie itself didn't showcase much other than that. Arguably better than Lugosi was. Despite a few isolated incidents, it does appear that being a good actor in a few bad movies might be beneficial, especially if one is starting out, though it is not a gamble without terrible risks. One risk is being typecast and eventually banished, as it were, to bad movies for the remainder of one's career. Although, because a bad movie is often easier to make than a good one, and probably easier to produce because quality usually requires an expenditure of effort and time while indifference to it doesn't require even a modicum of effort or time but the bare minimum (and not even that).

A Thought or Two About 'The Wizard (1989)', Or: Strange Synergy Becomes Surprise Cult Classic by Gary Hainsworth

August 2022, updated January 2023

The Wizard (1989) is a movie that seems to exist for no other reason than because it was thought at the time that a 90-minute commercial for Nintendo products, especially the Power Glove accessory and trailer for the then-upcoming American and English-language port of Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), the following February [1990] was required. And because Rain Man (1988) had grossed approximately $355 million dollars against a relatively meager 25 million dollar budget earlier that year, and Fred Savage, had a break between the filming of seasons two and three of The Wonder Years (1988-1993), something fascinating and worthwhile can be found peppered and sprinkled throughout the rickety Rain Man clone. A movie that seems to exist as the byproduct of one Lindsey Naegle-isque pitch; here fictionally speculated: 

"Well, video games are popular, and so is this Rain Man movie that just won Best Picture at the Academy Awards back in March, and made a s*it ton of money, especially women who make up 55% of its audience. And this Fred Savage kid from The Princess Bride and The Wonder Years, is dynamite. Very, very popular now, and so's this Nintendo thing my kids won't shut up about. So what if we put all of that together and made sure to have it out a week and a half before Christmas so kids will pester their parents to buy Nintendo games, accessories and guides because they just saw a 90-minute commercial telling them to buy, buy, buy, and hopefully that's just what their parents do: buy." Personally I would have thought a palette swapped Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which is arguably a better sequel to Chinatown (1974) than The Two Jakes (1990) was, would have served as a better plot for a two-hour commercial masquerading as a movie, but, for some reason, Rain Man seemed to be chosen instead.

One wonders if The Wizard would have been a palette swapped version of Driving Miss Daisy (1989), the following years Best Picture, had the 90-minute Nintendo ad gone into preproduction a year later. Still, regardless of the peculiar provenance The Wizard (1989), the picture ended up a cult classic, but probably not for the reasons the people who created this movie intended to fit it for posterity. Assuming posterity was ever a concern. It was a modest success at the box office, one which tripled its production budget of 6 million and went on to become a cult classic that has probably generated by now several times it's worldwide gross in rentals since 1989. Its subject matter and tone are also not what one expects from a Nintendo infomercial masquerading as a family drama about grief, mental illness, parental neglect, and a litany of other things that tonally clash. 

With the benefit of hindsight, I'm surprised that The Wizard (1989) didn't end up a quasi-remake of "They Shoot Horses, Don't They" (1969) with a Depression-era dance competition switched with a Reagan-era video game competition with a similarly maudlin deposition instead of Rain Main-lite, which still involves a brother taking a mentally challenged brother from an institution, going on an unauthorized road trip with him, gambling to earn money in a Nevada city but using a straw gambler to do the gambling for them and doing so in a different Nevada city. Reno instead of Las Vegas. However, neither Charlie nor Raymond Babbitt ends up going to Universal Studios Hollywood to win a video game competition. Perhaps shame on Barry Levinson, Barry Morrow, and Ronald Bass for not considering that.  

Due in some measure to its blatant commercialism, tone-deaf corporate synergism, and a unique subject matter derivative of movies, Rain Main (1988), and a smidgeon of Ordinary People (1980) [the drowned sister backstory], which most children at the time wouldn't have seen in theaters and probably wouldn't have wanted to watch eventually to find out for themselves why the Academy somehow thought it was better than Raging Bull (1980), that makes all of this an odd pairing for an ostensible Nintendo love letter, charm offensive, whatever you want to call it, during the third-generation videogame console era. The apogee of the classic NES era. Before the Sega Genesis. Before the 16-bit era, when 8-bit was still king. The movie appears to be a sincere attempt by the filmmakers to make a legitimate, albeit somewhat melodramatic, family movie with all the constraints of a corporate mandate weighing it down. Perhaps the ethos behind the creation of this film didn't see it as a movie as much as it saw it as a means for selling additional units of product. 

The strings that must have been attached to The Wizard's production were done at a time when corporate integration was by no means subtle, and product placement was more blatant because the subtle art of 'not being so obvious' had yet to be refined, dare I say perfected. Nor the understanding that one needs to be in the first place that well understood. Much the way old movies, particularly those of the silent and early sound era, seem janky in terms of their acting, editing, and writing because they medium was still being developed and its concomitant motion picture grammar beyond that of a glorified, filmed stage play, still being defined. The most glaring and hilarious example of this is a scene where our trio of protagonists our intimidated by Lucas, the closest thing this film has to a villain, using the Power Glove to easily excel in Rad Racer in a way Fred Savage's brother in the film and The Wizard alluded to in the title, can't possibly compete, as if I were a samurai showing off his superior swordsmanship, then gloats with self-satisfaction, and says, "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad." Saying this line as if the Power Glove had been the Infinity Gauntlet, and he just used it to wipe out half the universe. 

"I love the Power Glove. It's so Bad," is a line dripping with verbal irony since the closest thing this movie had to a proper antagonist meant 'bad' as in good, not bad as in an accurate description of the product. At least R.O.B. was a Third Generation peripheral that worked (even if only for two games, the forgettable mediocrities of Gyromite and Stack-up). And, while there remains much debate to this day, the real-life Power Glove failed, primarily because it was considered to be an overpriced, bad controller which worked on few games that long outlived its novelty. A wonderful documentary on the topic, The Power of Glove (2017), gives a far more detailed account of the Power Glove itself, its failure commercially or even as a technology with an ability to interact with the Nintendo as promised. Watching this scene somewhat reminds me of the joke in Scrooged (1988) where Robert Mitchum's character asks Bill Murray's character if he could throw in a little pet appeal -- birds, a squirrel, dormice because a recent study indicated that if the networks started to create television programming for cats and dogs, they could become steady viewers in about twenty years. The documentary also demonstrates how the technology, though the Power Glove itself was a failure, has gotten a second life. However, that is outside the limited scope of this article.

The irony of the line mentioned above, arguably the most famous line in the movie and the part almost everyone who has seen the movie and remembered it, remembers about it, appears unintended. An earnest but clumsy attempt to hype an upcoming product in a vehicle least capable but in retrospect became an accidental allusion because of how circumstances played out. Case in point: a scene that didn't require this particular Nintendo accessory in order to establish the bonafides of Lucas. For example, he could have actually played against Jimmy, the autistic video game wizard, and defeated him instead of getting the contrived scene we received instead. This would have made * spoilers ahead * Jimmy's eventual victory over Lucas in the finale more meaningful and entirely earned.

Is The Wizard a bad movie? I don't know. Probably, though, I haven't seen the movie in ages, and I'd be curious to watch it again and affix a written review to this article as an addendum to compare and contrast. Firstly, write a review based on my memory of the film, which is easily 20-plus years removed from the last time I saw this, from opening to closing credits to the present moment I am writing this. Secondly, write a review after having watched the movie for the first time in over twenty years, and attached has an amendment, hopefully not an ostensible carbon copy of the movie, cataloging my impressions of the film. Then again, that's an hour and forty minutes of my life I can't get back, nor $3.99 I can't be refunded, so I mustn't make the decision lightly. Still, the movie has laudable qualities, and as an effective time capsule of 1989, a primary document from a different era, it is not without its positive qualities, especially when one considers that a film like this would not be made. The likes of Wreck-It Ralph (2012), The Emoji Movie (2017) or Free Guy (2021) are probably what a 90-minute commercial for Nintendo would be like in the 2020s not a palette swapped Rain Man with a dash of Ordinary People.